The corridor above the city

Above the shops on this side of the bridge there's a wall with a row of small windows that seems to belong to nothing around it. That's the top of a corridor running from the city hall to the palace on the other side, almost a kilometre long and completely sealed off from the street below.

Cosimo I had it built in 1565 for the wedding of his son to a Habsburg archduchess, and Vasari, the architect, was given five months to do it. On the eastern stretch he ran into a tower house whose owners refused to sell, so he swung the corridor around it on brackets. That kink is still there, the one spot where you can see the family didn't get its way.

The higher the Medici climbed, the less they set foot in the city itself, and this corridor is that idea turned to stone.

On the far side Via de' Guicciardini carries on, and before long a church with an open portico out front appears on your right.